A federal jury began hearing testimony Monday in a civil lawsuit by a pair of men who say they were arrested in February 2007 by New Orleans police officers after one of them videotaped an officer pulling the hair and pushing to the ground a woman in a Carnival parade crowd.

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The lawsuit seeks not only monetary damages for Greg Griffith and Noah Learned, but also a judicial order requiring the New Orleans Police Department to take steps to ensure officers abide by the constitutional rights of citizens to observe and film police activity in public.

The plaintiffs, who are represented by students from Tulane Law School, along with attorney supervisors, said they will show the seven-juror panel that the NOPD has a pattern of wrongly arresting people who film them.

"In the New Orleans Police Department, it is a widely accepted and established custom for police officers to arrest and threaten people who film them," said Brittany Barrient, one of the students. The plaintiffs plan to testify, but call as witnesses other people who they believe will relate similar treatment when videotaping, observing or taking pictures of NOPD officers.

But James Mullaly, a deputy city attorney, told jurors that the case "is not a referendum on the NOPD," emphasizing that the plaintiffs "went out there to harass and interfere and annoy law enforcement."

Mullaly pointed out that Griffith was arrested three times during his almost four years in New Orleans, all in incidents similar to the one described in the lawsuit.

Griffith testified to his arrest on Feb. 18, 2007, a night when he was watching the Bacchus parade with friends on Canal Street. He told jurors that he'd gone out to watch the parade, but focused his camera on police officers when they came onto the scene to investigate a fight between two groups of girls that Griffith said had just broken up.

One of the officers, spotting a young woman allegedly involved in the fight, grabbed the girl by the hair and threw her to the ground, Griffith said. He yelled out, using an expletive, for the officers to leave the woman alone.

Griffith was filming the incident and kept filming two of the involved officers, D'Meecko Hughes and Brian Harrison, after the woman got up and left the scene. The video was played in court on Monday.

Although the officers walked back toward the parade at one point, the end of the video shows one rushing back toward the camera before it went blank. Griffith said the camera must have shut off when it hit the ground after the officer tackled him, causing his eyeglasses to break and scratch his face.

At all times, Griffith said he was at least 10 feet from the officers, not interfering with their actions. But Griffith and his friend Learned were arrested for "crossing or traversing a police cordon." Those charges were later dropped.

When Griffith got his digital camera back from jail officials after paying bail the next morning, it no longer contained a copy of the incident, he testified. A computer technician was able to restore it, he said.

Franz Zibilich, another attorney for the city, repeatedly questioned Griffith about his participation while a student at Kent State University in a program called Cop Watch, which trained people to observe and take photographs of police behavior that Zibilich characterized as "second-guessing and interfering with cops."

Griffith countered that he films police only if he sees them violating somebody's rights.

The jury also heard about two other incidents when Griffith was arrested in New Orleans, each time he said filming officers sparked the police response.

His attorneys have subpoenaed other witnesses in what is expected to be a three-day trial, including Gordon Russell, city editor of The Times-Picayune.

Russell last year wrote a story recounting being stopped by NOPD officers, along with a photographer from The New York Times, when they stumbled upon what they thought was a violent altercation between two men and police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Officers pointed guns at them, as well as taking Russell's notebook and the photographer's camera.